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Corey Harris, a 17-year-old star athlete at Dyett High School on Chicago’s South Side, was walking home from school on Friday, September 11, 2009, when an off duty Chicago cop chased him down and murdered him – shot in the back, like so many of the other teenagers gunned down by the Chicago pigs. The cop claimed that he saw Corey shooting a gun earlier, but Corey had no gun when he shot him in the back.

On the Monday after his murder, I spoke to one of Corey’s cousins outside Dyett High School. She told me that Corey’s muder was “an outrage against our school and many other schools that the police system keeps doing this to our students… Police are getting away with everything. And this don’t make no sense. He was only 17-years-old, and just had one baby. And I can’t even see him no more.”

Corey was well loved by many of his schoolmates, and several youth told me how he was their best friend, “my man,” and that now they would never see him again. On the Friday after he was killed, several students came up to the mic outside the school to speak out about his murder. As soon as school got out, a carload of police drove up to the front of the school to try to intimidate the students from speaking out. But several students got on the mic anyway and had this chant to say about the cop who killed Corey – “Lock his ass up! Lock his ass up!”

One of Corey’s friends stood up defiantly in the face of this repression and stood in front of two huge posters of faces and names of many people shot or killed by the Chicago police recently to say: “All I really got to say is – the police, ya’ll was wrong for gunning down Corey. Corey, we love you and miss you, and I’ll be at your funeral. It’s been tough the last few days, I didn’t feel like getting out the bed, but I knew I had to come to school anyway… You told me last week that you wanted to go to the NBA, and I believe if they had not killed you that you would have been a great basketball player. So police, I’m not scared of you all – I’m mad as hell at you all.”

Chicago police have been stepping up repression against those speaking out against police murders. Last Wednesday a comrade and I were threatened with arrest for over an hour an a half by a group of pigs outside Columbia College for showing the posters of the faces of people they have shot or killed and organizing for the October 22nd National Day of Resistance to Stop Police Brutality, Murder and the Criminalization of a Generation. But we refused to back down or shut up, and eventually they wrote us some tickets for some fabricated charge related to selling Revolution newspaper on the street. I don’t know what the ticket actually says, because I refused to sign mine, and then they threatened to arrest me for not signing it. I told them to stick that ticket up their ass and continued to speak on the mic to the crowd of 50 or so people gathered there about youth like Corey Harris, Rakeem Nance, and all the other young lives that have been snuffed out by the police, and the need for people of conscience to stand up and refuse to allow these murders to continue.

Indict, convict, and send the killer cop to jail – this whole damn system is guilty as hell!